Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual

A Nexus of Connections: Acts of Recovery, Acts of Resistance in Native Palimpsest

331 A NEXUS OF CONNECTIONS Acts of Recovery, Acts of Resistance in Native Palimpsest Kimberly M. Blaeser Oral stories must be heard to endure. “The Envoy to Haiku,” —Gerald Vizenor Ideology and domination have made certain histories unable to be spoken. Indians in Unexpected Places, —Philip Deloria Native writers began to use the Native present as a way to resurrect a Native past and to imagine a Native future. To create, in words, a Native universe. —Tom King, The Truth about Stories A Nexus of Connections From the outset of the Indigenous North American and European colonial encounter, Native epistemologies were characteristically either overlooked or blatantly rejected as primitive. From Christopher Columbus’s professed motive in the capturing of Arawak natives “in order that they might learn to talk”1 (Hale) to the destruction of the Mayan Popol Vuh, colonial responses to Indigenous cultures consistently failed to recognize the validity or sophistication of native communications. This kind of devaluation has continued through the present, with Native literary and artistic expressions being frequently marginalized, labelled inferior to Western works and methods, or stereotyped into simplistic, romantic representations. Themselves fully aware of the political and social constructs surrounding the idea of Indian, contemporary Native writers, artists, and filmmakers often depict the colonial conditions while simultaneously offering a critique of or resisting static popular images. They counter literary or artistic colonization with their own 332 Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual inspired and carefully crafted works. The nuanced gestures of Native poems, stories, visual art, and film become figurative acts of liberation, recovery, and resistance. My opening epigraphs suggest three critical stances important to understanding the tensions inherent in these artistic works. Gerald Vizenor’s statement asserts two necessities: oral storytelling itself must survive because oral storytelling is necessary for Indigenous peoples’ survival. The quotation from Phil Deloria attests to the still stifling effects of colonial domination on Native peoples’ ability to articulate their own experience and implies mainstream society’s unwillingness to accept the revelation of this history. Finally, Tom King’s comment points to many Native writers’ complex (and layered) project to reassert what N. Scott Momaday has called a Native “world view.” Theirs is a project that involves representation of the Native past, images of contemporary experience, and an assertion of future survival. In the pages that follow I look briefly at this critical context in which Native artists work, at their self-conscious undertakings in response to the pre-existing backdrop for their work, and finally, at the achievement of their art—how through ironic humour and gesture they succeed in exposing the colonial canvas on which they are compelled to create even as they erase, alter, or embellish those old representations. Key to the “re-visioning” of distortions in history or stereotypic popular images is an understanding of the contingency of cultural context, an awareness of the degree to which place and world view impact our expressions of “truth.” This idea might best be expressed through story: imagine two Indian communities that live in close proximity to each other, separated by a large lake (or an imaginary degree of latitude). One day, a non-Native visitor, a gichi-mookomaan, arrives at the first community. There the visitor is told that this Anishinaabe tribe’s council fire is the centre of the universe. This, of course, impresses the visitor for s/he is a seeker after enlightenment. The following day, several of the tribal people invite the visitor to travel with them to the other side of the lake, to the Blackfoot community that resides there. While the Anishinaabeg visit, the elders of the Blackfoot tribe declare that their council fire is the centre of the universe, and the Anishinaabeg nod their assent. Confused, the visitor turns to the Anishinaabe leader from the first tribe and says,“I thought you said that your fire was the centre.” The Anishinaabe replies, “When we’re there, that is the centre of the universe. When we are here, this is the centre.” This adaptation of a story told in George Tinker’s “An American Indian Theological Response to Ecojustice” suggests that culture centres are contingent. The shifting of contextual focus becomes key in A Nexus of Connections ■ Kimberly M. Blaeser 333 the literary and artistic reconstruction or performative recovery undertaken by Native writers and artists, who literally and figuratively build their art from within another / an other point of view. Creek...